During the past several years, a substantial growth has occurred in the quantity and diversity of information and services available over the Internet. The number of users of the Internet has similarly grown rapidly. A predominant growth area on the Internet has been in the use of the World Wide Web, often referred to as WWW, W3, or simply “the Web.” The hyper-text transfer protocol (HTTP) that serves as a foundation protocol for the Web has been widely adopted and implemented in numerous Web browsers and Web servers.
Web browsers provide a convenient user application for receiving textual and graphical information of individual Web pages in a scrollable display page format. The Web pages frequently allow a typical end-user to access a variety of educational, commercial, and retail Web sites through search boxes.
A search box auto-complete function has become an increasingly popular feature on many Web sites in recent years. The feature is now available on numerous sites, including Shopping.com, Yahoo!®, and Google Toolbar. However, traditional search box auto-complete has no ranking functionality, which means the auto-complete backend system will only respond with a generalized keyword list against a prefix from which the request is made. Thus, the end-user may not get expected results from the returned keyword list.